business communication

Recently I was driving to work and my mobile phone rang. The call was from a salesperson who works for the Atlanta Braves Baseball Team and he was trying to get me to buy tickets for employees or customers. “Thanks, but I am not interested”, I said, ready to hang up. He replied, “Oh, then is there someone else I should be talking to instead of you? I was transferred here?”. I replied, “No, I am the local Site Leader. We recently surveyed our employees and there was not a lot of interest in Braves Tickets”. “Really? I am surprised to hear that. It reallyRead More →

I believe that top notch communication skills are THE most important set of skills that any leader, at any level needs to possess and consistently hone. This includes verbal, written and virtual communication, across multiple mediums. I recently pulled together 10 of the better leadership communication articles from the first half of 2016. Please add any that I may have missed to the comments section. I hope that you find them helpful and thought provoking. Communication is the glue by Tim McMahon, A Lean Journey blog 5 tips for improving leadership communication by Brent Gleeson, Forbes.com Communication, the most important key to leadership success byRead More →

There is an epidemic in Corporate America that must be stopped! What is it? The consistent use or misuse of the Reply All function in email. As a result, I believe it should be disabled in ALL email programs. Or, perhaps we need to create a new security function called the Reply All police to crack down on the abusers. When I think of my own email volume daily, I would estimate that a minimum of 20 messages per day are from employees using the reply-all function to respond to a conversation, instead of limiting his or her response to the critical parties. It all startsRead More →

When colleagues communicate with you, do they know that you are listening? A few years ago, one of my peers asked me to accompany him into a meeting with our collective boss at the time, to help support him in a difficult discussion. In short, our boss was not happy about something that occurred and my peer disagreed with his approach. In the meeting, my peer shared a bunch of professional, yet direct thoughts and opinions and our boss listened. This went on for about 15 minutes and at the end of the discussion our boss said something that was genius. “I need some timeRead More →